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In the past I have been skeptical of the work of Robert Wilson, but all decent critics should be willing to revise their opinions with the passage of time, and I do not hesitate to acclaim Wilson's latest production — a video of Brad Pitt standing in his boxer shorts in the rain, holding a squirt gun — as a work of transfixing genius. La Cieca may seem to have a point in describing the opus as bizarrely boring, but she needs to delve deeper into its layers of signification.

Peter Lieberson marked his sixtieth birthday on October 25. Given what this profoundly gifted composer has endured in recent months, he may not have wished for much in the way of celebration, but the occasion should not pass unnoticed. In a formidable catalogue of scores, a few favorites are the early Piano Concerto (No. 1), which fulfills in some way the wish that Stravinsky had written one more large-scale score along the lines of the Symphony in Three Movements; the rigorous, sensuous Drala, in which the composer really finds his own voice (alas, the DG recording is out of print); and, of course, the two recent song cycles, Rilke Songs and Neruda Songs, both written for the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The good news is that a Nonesuch recording of Neruda will be released on Dec. 19. (I contributed to the liner notes, so I won't be writing about it.) On a personal note: in my article "Listen to This," I referred to a college teacher who described my end-of-term submission as a “most interesting and slightly peculiar sonatina.” This was then-Prof. Lieberson, in a generous mood. It was a harmony seminar, and I remember how he devoted one afternoon to the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, marveling at the sensuousness of that sonic gift from husband to wife. Neruda Songs casts a very similar spell. I am sure that everyone wishes Lieberson the best.

As AC Douglas and others have noted, the San Francisco Symphony has launched a major extension of its Keeping Score series, which I extolled in an early post on this blog. There's now a website devoted to Beethoven's Eroica, with parallel sites forthcoming for the Rite of Spring and Appalachian Spring. You can follow along in the score, trace transformations of the thematic material, read historical guides, and, in general, receive as good a class in music appreciation as is out there. All this serves as background for Michael Tilson Thomas's imminent PBS documentaries on Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Copland (check listings here).... Also impressive to behold is the internet home of the School of Music at UT Austin, which is now offering webcasts for almost all its concerts. On Sunday night you can hear an all-Debussy theater evening — the American premiere of Robert Orledge's new realization of the unfinished Fall of the House of Usher, the world premiere of Orledge's orchestration of Chansons de Bilitis, and L'Enfant prodigue. The event takes place in conjunction with the Claude Debussy International Congress. On Tuesday there's a webcast of Donald Crockett's music as performed by the UT New Music Ensemble. But why nothing for the UT Tuba/Euphonium Ensemble? Topic for Tuba News.... The revitalized Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is blogging. Ronen Givony, a CMS staffer, has also launched his own Wordless Music series, a fascinating attempt to bridge the gap between composition and progressive pop. The next event is on Nov. 15, with performances by A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Steven Beck, and Andrew Bird. Darcy James Argue had a report on the first show, of which I saw only the first part.

Sonic Impact, a two-day festival by the consortium New Music Chicago, starts tomorrow in the big-shouldered city. Seventeen ensembles will participate, including such national new-music stars as Eighth Blackbird and ICE, together with outfits that are new to me, such as HardArt groop, which aims to "save
the world from bad programming and to try and get
everyone to not take themselves so seriously," and admits to having "completely failed." Mark-Anthony Turnage is the guest composer.

Having touted Carnegie's Reich site, I should also point out that the Whitney has put recordings of the Oct. 15 Reichathon on its website. The TACTUS performance of Eight Lines and the Alarm Will Sound / So Percussion performance of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ are especially good.

On Friday night, I heard Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Carnegie Hall: it harnessed immense forces to a musical narrative of surprising swiftness, even brutal efficiency. Four nights later, I heard something no less gigantic: Morton Feldman's "For Philip Guston," which sent a small complement of musicians into spaces of vast dimensions. The flutist Petr Kotik, the pianist Joseph Kubera and the percussionist Chris Nappi, all members of the S.E.M. Ensemble, played this five-hour trio in the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo on Tuesday night; the audience was about a twentieth the size of Carnegie's, but the burst of stupefied pleasure at the end was just as intense.

Mahler compared his symphony to suns and planets revolving; there is something celestial, too, about Feldman's "Guston," whose disconnected slivers of sound glimmer like starlight. Some stretches are dense with figuration and detail; others are nearly empty, with flecks of music hanging here and there. The work stretches itself before the ears like the sky on a clear night; any hints of larger patterns are probably self-invented constellations.

What makes "Guston" fundamentally and wondrously beautiful is its harmony. Feldman's whole career was a search for ways to string together lovely chords, and "Guston" contains some of his most lustrous inventions. He is careful to parcel them out economically, so that they arrive as gratifying shocks after stretches of more neutral sound.These islands of beauty are like suggestions of figuration at the center of an abstract painting. (Feldman dedicated the work to the painter Philip Guston, even though he condemned Guston's turn from abstraction.)

There is also a kind of structure to "Guston," or at least so it appeared to one onlooker. (Further acquaintance can be gained through a recording on the Hat Art label.) The first two hours present some of the toughest, most unyielding material, as if to weed out casual listeners. At about the midway point, Feldman begins to give the sound more tonal and rhythmic focus: there is a dizzyingly beautiful spell of C major, a gently dancing passage in triplets. For much of the way, the three instruments play in separate time signatures, giving the attacks a certain chancy imprecision; but toward the end the meters come into sync.

Feldman's genius was always in the ending. At a point where the music seems to have ground to a halt completely, the glockenspiel begins to play a descending melody in unblemished A minor. This scalar figure sounds 50 more times in the work's last few minutes, sometimes cleanly harmonized, sometimes couched in hazy dissonance. There are also enigmatic clocklike strokes on the chimes and soft clusters on the piano. The whole miraculous passage was superbly realized by Mr. Kotik and his players, whose concentration never faltered through the whole five-hour span.

At the end of his cosmic journey, Mahler discovered great shining columns of sound, trumpets and banners, the gates of heaven. At the outer limit of a late 20th-century universe, Feldman found an ancient music box playing mournful scales. The world ends not with a bang, not with a whimper, but a sigh.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is in the belly of the beast. The brilliant young
Finnish conductor has begun his third season as music director of the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the city of eternal celebrity is making
its ominous presence felt. A few blocks away, at the Los Angeles County
Superior Court, the self-styled "trial of the century" creeps forward;
endless banks of satellite dishes beam the epic trivialities of Judge
Ito's courtroom into space. The orchestra's home is the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion, better known to billions as the historic arena of
the Oscars. Where Sally Field shrieked and Jack Nicholson smirked,
where John Williams accepted an Oscar for his score to "Star Wars," Mr.
Salonen spent a day recently rehearsing Witold Lutoslawski's intricate,
ambivalent Piano Concerto.

A decade ago, Mr. Salonen was
organizing sparsely attended avant-garde concerts in Finland. Now, at
36, he holds the most important musical post in the most media-intense
city in the world. And he has made his task more difficult by
maintaining a commitment to 20th-century repertory. Rather than
vanishing in the middle of the season, the Lutoslawski concerto
appeared defiantly in the orchestra's gala opening concert, flanked by
Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps."
A bias toward the modern also infuses the Los Angeles Philharmonic
programs Mr. Salonen will conduct this afternoon and tomorrow evening
at Avery Fisher Hall, with music of Lutoslawski, Ravel, Schoenberg,
Bartok, Sibelius and, the odd man out, Beethoven.

A recipe for
disaster? Strange to say, Mr. Salonen's tenure has been an unqualified
success. Subscriptions are up, while the average age of the audience
has declined, showing an incursion of younger listeners. One can credit
the canny long-range planning of Ernest Fleischmann, the orchestra's
managing director, or the aggressive marketing campaign that has
plastered the maestro's boyish good looks around town. But the
essential factors are Mr. Salonen's conducting, which has a graceful
dynamism about it, and his programming, which puts forward a very
distinct musical world-view.

Mr. Salonen appears to be making
headway against the toughest problem facing the American orchestra: the
aging of the established audience and the deepening indifference of
younger generations. Is he the next Leonard Bernstein, the ardently
awaited savior figure, able to explain the unfamiliar and build
audiences over time? Or is he the next Pierre Boulez, first enticing
but eventually exhausting listeners with a severe contemporary diet?

It's
too early to say, but Mr. Salonen is most likely neither. He does not
possess Bernstein's demagogic glamour or Mr. Boulez's didactic focus.
He does, however, provide the kind of decisive regional leadership that
American orchestras most need right now, more than any across-the-board
miracle cure. Audiences take notice when an orchestra acquires a vision
overnight.

MR. SALONEN BEGAN AS A composer, not a conductor,
and he still pursues composing when time allows. He grew up in an
aberrant musical culture that treats composers with respect. Like other
Scandinavian countries, Finland gives generous support to the arts, and
composers are lavished with commissions and grants.

"It was
like a bloody greenhouse," Mr. Salonen said between rehearsals,
speaking impeccable British-accented English. "Until I was about 25, I
never gave any thought to the pragmatic aspects of music-making, such
as having an audience. Sometimes we had contemporary-music concerts,
and maybe four people would come, including my mother."

His
base was the Finnish avant-garde collective Ears Open, which he formed
with the composers Magnus Lindberg, Jouni Kaipainen and Kaija Saariaho.
Their works deployed a full range of post-Serialist devices, although
they avoided the major pitfalls of European esotericism. Even the most
teemingly complex music from this group had an overall lucidity of
structure, a kind of landscape wholeness characteristic of Scandinavian
music in all periods. Mr. Salonen's music, which has been collected on
a Finlandia disk, is extrovert and eclectic, scampering through
minutely detailed motifs and timbres.

More or less by default,
Mr. Salonen conducted Ears Open concerts. "I never planned a career as
a conductor," he said. "When I was studying composition, I looked at
conductors as the main enemies of music. The image of Karajan
conducting 'Heldenleben' and riding a motorbike in his leather jacket
was very far removed from the things we were trying to do. It happened
very gradually, but I started feeling the pull of Bruckner and
Beethoven, not to mention the 20th-century classics, and they just
gradually took over."

In storybook fashion, he burst on the
international scene in 1983, summoned at the last minute to conduct the
London Philharmonia in Mahler's Third Symphony. His overnight triumph
led to a full-time appointment with the Swedish Radio Symphony and an
American debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984. A subsequent
contract with Sony Classical has produced dozens of recordings, among
them definitive accounts of major works by Messiaen and Lutoslawski, an
excellent Stravinsky series and one of the best modern versions of
Mahler's Fourth Symphony. After a stint as principal guest conductor,
Mr. Salonen replaced Andre Previn as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's
music director in 1992.

From the evidence of two recent
rehearsals, he has established an easy rapport with The orchestra. He
takes a cool, understated approach, not at all dictatorial. Indeed, he
has a tendency to mumble. Rehearsing "Le Sacre du Printemps," he made
brief remarks that were inaudible from the front seats in the
auditorium and possibly to many of the players as well. But his wishes
are conveyed all the same; on a second try, the passage in question
came into sharper focus. Balancing on the balls of his feet in a
gymnastic stance, nervously gesticulating toward his ears when
something displeases him, he is unmistakably in command. The orchestra
sounds better than ever, clearly in the front rank of American
ensembles.

Any conductor in Los Angeles must also establish a
good rapport with Mr. Fleischmann, renowned for his sometimes
domineering treatment of conductors and his controversial ideas about
the role of the modern orchestra. Serving as music director in the
Fleischmann regime entails any number of tasks outside the regular
subscription schedule: leading contemporary-music and chamber-orchestra
ensembles, delivering preconcert lectures, conducting youth concerts,
and traveling with the orchestra to Los Angeles neighborhoods and
schools that have no easy access to orchestral music.

Pronouncing
the traditional orchestra an outdated institution, Mr. Fleischmann has
called for a more flexible "community of musicians" to take its place.
Yet he is severely critical of the 1993 American Symphony Orchestra
League report, "Americanizing the American Orchestra," which proposed
that orchestras abandon an elite stance and literally dress themselves
down for different audiences.

"All that has nothing to do with
what we're here for," Mr. Fleischmann said. "No matter what the origin
or background of the audience, it still recognizes quality, and it
still recognizes integrity. If we pursue a clear artistic direction,
people will become more passionate about what we do."

Mr.
Salonen is of the same mind. "I don't think anything drastic is
needed," he said, "because obviously we are acting on the basic
hypothesis that classical music is good, that classical music has to
exist. We don't need to wear different clothes or funny hats, and we
don't have to deny the basic fact that symphony orchestras are
specialist groups who play certain segments of the music of the world.
Either this music we play has enough energy and a message intense
enough to be able to survive, or it doesn't."

The radical point
in Mr. Salonen's agenda is his insistence that the repertory be
centered on the music of this century. "If you want to reach a young
person who has not learned classical music at home or in the schools,
the best repertory is 20th-century repertory rather than Mozart or
Haydn or Beethoven. Just because of the familiarity of the sound world,
something like 'Le Sacre' gives you a sense of recognition, even if
your only point of reference is rock music. It doesn't belong to the
establishment; there is no political or class difference."

Many
conductors make earnest gestures toward contemporary music, programming
the work of the temporarily popular composer X or the critically
fashionable composer Y. Mr. Salonen's commitment goes deeper. Some
two-thirds of the scores he has conducted in the last three years were
written in this century: among them, four works of Schoenberg, seven of
Stravinsky and four of Lutoslawski, alongside music of Henri Dutilleux,
Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Roger Reynolds, Elliott Carter, Steven
Stucky, Bernard Rands and Kaija Saariaho.

With 20th-century
music, presentation is everything. The longstanding method of tempting
audiences with a war horse, then sneaking in a premiere beside it often
falls flat, because it fails to establish a context for the new piece;
the discrepancy between old and new is all the more plain. (One is
reminded of the Bernstein concert that absurdly paired John Cage's
"Atlas Eclipticalis" with Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony.)

MR.
SALONEN, BY contrast, relies on what he calls 20th-century classics:
works of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok that are foreign neither to the
average concertgoer nor to the newer pieces he is advocating. An
elegant example was a 1993 juxtaposition of Debussy and Ligeti, in
which Mr. Ligeti's intensely atmospheric instrumental style could be
heard beside its Impressionist predecessor.

This blend of the
shocking and the no-longer-shocking took a while to catch on. "After a
kind of hesitant beginning," Mr. Salonen recalled, "something happened
in the spring of the first season. All of a sudden the kind of program
that was selling out at the box office was Bartok's Second Violin
Concerto and a Haydn symphony." He sensed he was beginning to reach out
to an audience that ordinarily paid no attention to orchestral
concerts.

"There's a crowd that goes to contemporary art
exhibitions, art cinema and so forth," he continued, "people who
basically use their brains more than average people, but they don't
come to classical-music concerts. They don't see a symphony orchestra
as part of the contemporary art scene. But now they've started to
realize that the Philharmonic is moving into this century."

Mr.
Salonen's new audience, if it stays interested, could have far-reaching
implications for the way concerts are sold. "I think we are coming to a
point where it will be increasingly difficult to market all your
subscriptions as one package," he said. "People in my generation and
the younger generation are more eclectic in their tastes, very specific
about what they want to do. I would like to be a part of that kind of
menu."

Mr. Salonen is one of several younger conductors who
have shaken up orchestral and also operatic programming in recent
years. Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano and Myung-Whun Chung are the best
known, and Mr. Salonen considers them allies, not rivals. In
particular, Mr, Rattle's remarkable achievement in building an audience
for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra through unconventional
repertory is a good omen for the new Los Angeles regime.

A
SLIGHTLY LESS ENCOURAGING analogy is Pierre Boulez's iconoclastic
seven-year tenure with the New York Philharmonic in the 1970's. Mr.
Salonen acknowledges the "slightly frightening parallel" between his
career and that of Mr. Boulez, whom he admires and speaks to often. But
there are important differences.

First, Mr. Salonen does not
disdain the standard repertory; he is an acclaimed Haydn conductor, and
his Beethoven interpretations (in contrast to Mr. Boulez's) seem to
have pleased rather than alienated the broad public. He also has a
filial enthusiasm for widely beloved Scandinavian Romantics like Grieg,
Sibelius and Nielsen. Second, the contemporary music Mr. Salonen has
promoted in Los Angeles is generally not the sort that drives audiences
away. He is openly critical of some of the more unsociable trends of
the postwar era, particularly Serialism.

"The basic assumption
in Serial music was that language could be created," he said. "But
language can't be created, unless you happen to be some kind of god. To
make it functional, you also have to create people who speak the same
language. It's like Esperanto; if you look at Esperanto from an
objective point of view, it's the best language in the world, because
it's absolutely logical, solid, very easy to learn, no dialects, no
problems or exceptions in the grammar. Yet no one speaks it. The same
thing happened to Serialism."

He does not sympathize, however,
with the neo-conservatives who disavow the whole postwar avant-garde as
an erroneous detour. "There was still a lot of good music composed in
that period," he said. "We learned so much about musical textures via
Serialism. But the freedom from it is liberating. I think we might be
coming to the point where it's possible to compose again. You don't
have to be neo-something, neo-Romantic or whatever; you can just write
music. People from very different angles are heading toward something
that could become a mainstream musical language. The kind of things
that John Adams writes today can sound surprisingly much like Magnus
Lindberg."

For Mr. Salonen, the giants of this new mainstream
are composers like Messiaen and Lutoslawski, who exploited or even
initiated technical advances without becoming attached to any school of
thought. Between the arrogant idealism of Serialism and the panicky
nostalgia of neo-Romanticism is a middle path of complex but seductive
sound, in which the myriad possibilities of 20th-century
experimentation are absorbed into a clear musical picture.

Mr.
Salonen is particularly devoted to Lutoslawski, who died in February
and whose valedictory Fourth Symphony is on the Avery Fisher Hall
program tomorrow. "He found his true and final language at the age of
70," Mr. Salonen said. "In his last works the balance between form and
content is perfect. He was one of the few composers who was able to
play with the listener's experience of form. There are sections where
very little happens, in order to make the appearance of the next event
more effective. It's the technique of a classical master."

Mr.
Salonen's reverence for the music of his colleagues is, of course,
rooted in his own urge to compose. He is the only conductor of a major
American orchestra, and one of the very few conductors worldwide, who
pursues an active composing career. Now that he is established in Los
Angeles, he wants more time to write music.

"I was very pleased
when it came out," he said of the Finlandia CD of his music. "But then
I was holding it in my hand, and I thought, this is 10 years of my life
on one bloody CD. I was very jumpy that afternoon; I called my agent
immediately and said: 'Cancel this. Cancel that. I need more time to
work.' Then I went and accepted a commission for a big piece for 1997.

"But
I don't regret the time spent on conducting," he added. "It's wonderful
to be able to work with this music, and I feel very privileged.
Sometimes I have these funny moments of joy. I'm studying the score,
and I suddenly realize how great the music is, and I'm overcome by very
powerful feelings of euphoria."

On Wednesday night I'll appear with various critics at a Best Music Writing 2006 reading at Housing Works. This is the first year classical music has been admitted to Da Capo's yearly compendium; I'm honored to be at the cool kids' party. Thursday there's a John Zorn thing at Miller, with the ubiquitous Brad Lubman conducting and extended rock vocalist Mike Patton singing and/or making noise. On Friday, the widely loved St. Lawrence Quartet plays Weill Hall, with R. Murray Schafer's wildly theatrical Third String Quartet on the program. (Some adventurous orchestra should revive Schafer's 1968 collage classic Son of Heldenleben.) Scott St. John is replacing Barry Shiffman, who is now at the Banff Centre. Saturday has been identified by Steve Smith as this year's Night of Too Many Concerts. There is the local premiere of Reich's You Are (Variations)at Lincoln Center; there is Marilyn Nonken in recital at NYU; there is the Bowed Piano Ensemble at Jazz at Lincoln Center; there is John Holloway playing Bach partitas at Miller; there is Jonathan Nott conducting the NY Phil in Ligeti's Lontano and Bartók's First Piano Concerto (with Peter Serkin): and there is Aki Takahashi performing two sublime piano works by Morton Feldman — Piano and For Bunita Marcus — at Merkin. Anyone who has never heard Takahashi play the piano will be unprepared for the unearthly beautiful sound that she gets from the instrument. Agonizingly, I have to miss this, because I am covering the Reich series, but I strongly urge others to go. Finally, on Sunday, Valery Gergiev tramples out the grapes of wrath in the finale of his Shostakovich cycle: Symphonies Nos. 8 and 13, two long peals of thunder. If you happen to live in Seattle, the Seattle Chamber Players has an evening of world premieres by Baltic-area composers.

Prof. Heebie McJeebie is at it again: "As a Professor, I've found that the more expertise I acquire, the less I enjoy what I hear." The beloved, feared, reclusive, possibly nonexistent academic interviews Claire Chase of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Chicago/New York group whose voyeuristic videocam staging of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King was one of the sharpest shows I saw last season. Of course, it wasn't quite at the tenured level....

I dropped by 192 Books, my neighborhood bookstore, to find something to read in between endless rewritings of my book draft, and I came away with We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live, the Everyman's Library of Joan Didion's nonfiction work. The book contains, as no one needs to be told, some of the finest modern prose in the English language, and I'm relieved to put into storage those ratty, chewed-up, used-bookstore paperbacks in which I've read Didion's masterpieces in the past. (I'll save them for the country house that I will purchase when The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is chosen for Oprah's Book Club and becomes a surprise runaway bestseller, Oprah having kept secret until now her passion for Xenakis.) The surprise for me was to come across "God's Country," which Didion published in the New York Review of Books in October 2000. I didn't read it at the time. It is a sustained analysis of the phrase "compassionate conservatism," and it is a chilling prophecy of things to come. Didion's writing brings to mind something Schoenberg once said to Oscar Levant: "I can see through walls."

My concertgoing for the remainder of the week is taken up with Steve Reich events — the Young Artists Concert tonight, the grand concert on Saturday, Discovery Day and the Daniel Variationspremiere on Sunday — and I'll have to miss other things that look distinctly promising. Tonight at Angel Orensanz the Metropolis Ensemble opens its second season with David Schiff's All About Love— "a panoramic meditation on love as expressed in different times and
languages and from different points of view: male and female, gay and
straight, from youthful ardor to mature resignation" — and Monteverdi's eternally entertaining Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. (Schiff is also a brilliant critic — read his piece on Reich in The Nation.) On Friday and Saturday nights, the incontestably kick-ass Alarm Will Sound will do $12 shows at the Kitchen, with repertory ranging from Johannes Cicconia to Nancarrow's player-piano pieces and on to Birtwistle. Two events at Joe's Pub: on Friday, Brad Lubman, who offered fiercely expressive video-linked acoustic-and-electronic music at the recent American Composers Orchestra show, plays with his band Electric Fuzz, and on Sunday Ethel presents music of John King. Meanwhile, the blögøsphère's Jeremy Denk serves up late-night Bach at the Kaplan Penthouse, possibly with naked supermodels, or so he hinted in a recent post. We do hear things have been getting pretty wild up in the Kaplan Penthouse lately: these innovative, late-night classical concerts are raging out of control, and the neighbors might have to call the police.

In the mail today I received a brochure for the fiftieth Contemporary Music Festival in Venice, part of the Venice Biennale. For opening night, the increasingly inventive and unpredictable Klangforum Wien put together the following marathon program: "Trinklied" from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Bernhard Gander's Bunny Games, Beat Furrer's spur, Enno Poppe's Salz, Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (a work that transfixes me every time I listen to it), Scelsi's Anahit, Xenakis's Psappha, Terry Riley's In C, and Feldman's Instruments I. Nice to see that In C is finally getting some respect behind the Euromodern iron curtain. (It was booed at Darmstadt in 1969.) The Biennale is so uncompromisingly avant-garde that they send out their promotional literature only after the events in question are over: the concert happened on September 29.

The NHK Symphony's appearance at Carnegie, with a rare performance of Takemitsu's A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, falls on the same night as the opening of the Kirov Orchestra's Shostakovich series. Frustrated at having to choose between the two, I had the idea of going down to Philadelphia to hear the orchestra there. But, it turns out, the Takemitsu isn't on the program in Philadelphia. Nor in LA, San Francisco, or Boston. Is New York really the only city in the land where audiences can handle this gorgeous work by Japan's greatest twentieth-century composer? Must audiences elsewhere hear the Enigma Variations one more time? Sadly typical.

Update: Allan Ulrich writes in to point out that A Flock was given its premiere by the San Francisco Symphony in 1977.

Further update: Andrew Tunick has discovered a second city that's been deemed safe for Takemitsu: New Brunswick, NJ.

Several knowledgeable folks have written in on the subject of compression in pop production, which Sasha kicked up and I punted below. Mauro Graziani sent a link to an unsigned article on
"The Death of Dynamic Range," which shows, in the form of waveform
graphs, how "loudness wars" have squeezed dynamic contrast out of many pop recordings, creating a uniform wall of sound. The chart above, derived from Ricky Martin's 1999 album Ricky Martin, is a case in point. Nick
Southall has more to say on the issue in Stylus. And Douglas Wolk sent along, per request, the text of his article "Compressing Pop," which was delivered at the EMP Pop Conference a few years back and published in Eric Weisbard's anthology This Is Pop. Douglas explains why people like to use the device: "Compression is like salt: a little of it makes everything sound better. Compressed voices sound more authoritative; compressed instruments sound more precise and energetic. Done properly, it gives sound more oomph." But: "Making CDs very loud means that you can't do much else with them. When a recording is ultra-maximized, its dynamic range is severely limited, and it loses what's called 'headroom' — the amount by which a recording can get louder than it is, the sound-engineering equivalent of available space. Without headroom, the entire recording starts turning into one dense, undifferentiated clump of sound." And he suggests why Timbaland's productions have had such blistering impact in recent years: they avoid sonic uniformity by interpolating sudden, yawning silences into the middle of tracks.

Andrew Sullivan: "Earlier this week, secretary of state Condi Rice and First Lady Laura Bush attended a State Department ceremony for the new global AIDS coordinator. His name is Mark Dybul. Money quote from USA Today: 'At a State Department ceremony this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly acknowledged the family members of Mark Dybul, whom she was swearing in as the nation's new global AIDS coordinator. As first lady Laura Bush looked on, Rice singled out his partner, Jason Claire, and Claire's mother. Rice referred to her as Dybul's "mother-in-law."' There you have it. Among decent elite Republicans, there is often great acceptance of gay people as individuals, and of their families and spouses. 'Mother-in-law' is itself an affirmation of marriage for gay couples; and the secretary of state just used those words. And yet her party officially regards gay unions as, in James Dobson's words, a prelude to the 'destruction of the earth'. So which is it, guys? Let us know some time, will you?"